Circle The Clown Cars

I took a temporary hiatus from Twitter last weekend, so I missed President Trump’s Saturday Tweetstorm about the Four Freshmen of the Apocalypse: Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (I don’t know what Pressley has done specifically to be included in the squad other than be on the cover of Rolling Stone with the other three and Nancy Pelosi, but I digress.) What I did see was the internal Democrat poll from earlier in the week that found Omar and AOC in abysmal standing with swing voters. Getting to see Trump’s remarks in the context of that poll from Axios was important, because I got to see the Twittering for the strategic masterstroke that it was.

First of all, Trump was not making racist remarks about these four women, not was he telling them to “go back where they came from.” He was essentially telling them to put up or shut up, to go see the brokenness of these countries, and admit they don’t have it so bad.

However Trump meant it, it was clearly interpreted as racist. Thousands of people, left and right, took to Twitter to condemn the tweets. What most missed is that those tweets had a very clear intent, which played out beautifully over the course of the week. Trump baited the establishment Democrats into circling the wagons around the so-called “Squad,” simultaneously allowing him to broad-brush them as the face of the Democratic Party.

I don’t understand the grumbling from some on the right that Trump ruined the fun of the in-party scrum between the establishment and the Four Follying Females. The fight may have been hilarious in the short term, and it may have deepened the crack in the Party structure, but the Dems would have coalesced around their Presidential candidate in time for the election, so whatever benefits a schism would have now are probably for naught come November 2020. Furthermore, Nancy Pelosi and the moderate faction were winning the fight overwhelmingly and making the Squad look even more foolish, as if that were possible. What’s more, Pelosi’s stomping of the squad at least provided the illusion that the Democrats are still just your friendly neighborhood, virtue-signaling, redistributionist idiots, instead of the aggressively ignorant, Jew-hating, actually socialist conglomerate of actually terrible people the “Squad” seems to be dragging the Party by their teeth toward becoming. By a few taps of his phone, he forced the Democrats to circle their clown cars around their fresh faces™ to protect them from the slings and arrows of the orange man. At the same time, he put the “Squad” back in front of the cameras, the breeding ground for all manner of Democratic nightmares.

As far as the racism of the tweets are concerned, it’s seems to me that was part of Trumps plan. By intentionally breaking up his comments, he made them seem worse than they actually are, leading the left to cry racism once again, and only further desensitize moderate voters towards their cynical ploy. Trumps base will follow him wherever he goes. They aren’t fazed by accusations of RAYSIZUM because they’ve been hearing it for three years. But Trump is making a big gamble with moderate voters. He’s not trying to win them over to his side necessarily. He doesn’t really need them to win. However, he needs them to not vote for the Democrats. By putting the Four Freshmen front and center, he is making the whole party unpalatable to moderate voters. No matter who comes out of the Democratic Primary, the public, televised face of the party will continue to be the “Squad.”

I think Trumps play will work in the end. They proved him right this week, when the story developed and snowballed into a chaotic mess for the Democrats, with the Squad’s press conference, the resolution, even a resolution to debate impeachment. Democrats and the Media (but I repeat myself) played right into his hands. The Squad’s increasing presence as well as their deep unpopularity will make them a focal point of the 2020 cycle. The most dangerous place for Democrats is between the “Squad” and a TV camera. All Trump needs to do is keep them there.

As an observer, I’m glad I got to observe his plan in all its glory before anyone I know of picked up on it. Sometimes you have to get away to see things as they really are.

It’s Time For New Ownership at YouTube

In the wake of the drama between Steven Crowder and Carlos Maza, and now the onset of the Vox adpocalypse, I’ve come to this conclusion: it’s time for new ownership at YouTube.

What started as an open platform for all manner of content and quickly grew into a sprawling community of entertainers has become, in a short manner of time, a festering pile of hot garbage, a breeding ground for corporate cronyism and blandly corrupt partisan hackery. Intentionally vague and arbitrary community guidelines and kowtowing to the overwhelmingly left-wing corporate culture have crippled the spirit of creativity that allowed the website to blossom. Mainstream media sites dominate the conversation on everything from politics to entertainment. Furthermore, the asinine copyright ID system, which is stacked heavily in favor of massive corporations and often totally disregards if not outright flouts fair use law, renders null the hard work of brilliant creators and further stifles creativity and the livelihoods of video makers. These problems are mitigated by activist employees and ineffective algorithms. And all these problems have come to a head under the leadership of current CEO Susan Wojcicki.

By all objective standards, Susan Wojcicki has failed. Her time at the company has been marred by three massive advertising cutdowns, the “Adpocalypses,” censoring of popular creators, and countless dissatisfied users. All these problems have manifested themselves, and the YouTube team’s actions these past few days have made it overwhelmingly clear that YouTube has seen enough of Wojcicki’s milquetoast leadership. YouTube needs a principled Chief Executive who will stand with creators, who won’t bend to the will of the perpetually-ravenous and unforgiving leftist mob. It needs someone who will allow creativity to flourish, and allow creators more autonomy over their work. It needs someone who won’t censor creators because of political affiliation or for violating arbitrary rules.

It’s time for YouTubers to take charge of their future. Stand up for your fellow creators. Make noise about this issue. Buy up shares of YouTube. Move to alternative platforms. Decide for yourselves that enough is enough and take action to build a better platform, by creators, for creators.

This latest scandal will draw a line in the sand for many in the YouTube community, as well it should. No more kowtowing to idiot propagandists with hurt feelings. No more bending to sacks of corporate money. If YouTube and its creators want to survive, sweeping change is needed. It starts at the top.

Vox’s gay propagandist is Mad Online for being called a gay propagandist

Over the weekend, Carlos Maza, the far-left writer of Vox’s “Strikethrough” series, posted a twenty tweet-long thread in which he ranted about conservative comedian and commentator Steven Crowder. Maza used the thread to cry wolf about Crowder’s numerous rebuttals to the notoriously dishonest video series, which repeatedly makes ridiculous assertions and frequently smears conservative, libertarian, and right-wing content creators.

The curiously-timed thread coincides with two events that happened over the weekend: The beginning of June, which marks the start of “Pride Month,” and the release of Crowder’s newest video debunking Vox’s latest conspiracy garbage, a video called, “You’re Watching Fox News. You Just Don’t Know It.” Maza is clearly trying to pounce on these two events to try to force YouTube into silencing a competing content creator, another lashing out by the dying Beast (heh) that is the far-left clickbait “news” industry.

Even more important than the extraneous circumstances is the content of Maza’s tweets. I’m gonna go though this guy’s tirade and try and understand what his problem is.

This entire thread is built on a lie. The guy claims to have “pretty thick skin,” but here he is crying wolf about “haRaSsMeNt” on the internet.

Off to a marvelous start.

I love how this guy has put together a 1:25 clip of Crowder calling him things *he calls himself* out of *over two and a half hours* of content. The other 156 minutes and 35 seconds are Crowder going point by point, refuting your garbage claims.

Yes, you have been called an “anchor baby, lispy queer, and Mexican.” Because you called yourself those things. Observe:

As far as being doxxed is concerned, I absolutely condemn it. Crowder explicitly condemns it. Every decent person explicitly condemns it. You can’t attribute this to Crowder or the right without being totally dishonest. Yet this guy does it anyway, because he’s dishonest.

I’m deeply skeptical of any claims of “harassment” by leftists anymore. Being flooded with text messages from randos on your personal cell phone is despicable. Receiving mean words on Twitter dot com is another thing entirely, and I really can’t feel bad for you. You have to be conscious of the inevitability of encountering mean words on Twitter because it’s just part of the discourse on the hellsite. If you get ratioed, it’s your own damn fault. If some anonymous sock account tweets “debate Crowder lol,” don’t respond. Or block them, as this guy apparently does. Twitter is not real life. Put your phone down.

The next tweet is where things start to get meaty. He starts with the demonizing “right wingers are monsters” canard all leftist activists throw around. Expected, but still gross. Then he plays another BS card, this time the “why aren’t these companies enforcing their ambiguous and arbitrary policies against harassment?” card, and appealing to the company’s vapid virtue signaling. He complains about being harassed for his sexuality, but here he is throwing it around, along with his millions of dollars of Vox’s corporate money, to intimidate YouTube into censoring a competing channel. 

    

He admits he’s tried to get Crowder’s videos flagged. Then repeats the same complaint from the previous tweet. As for his second point, Crowder has 3.8 million subscribers, and demonetizing the videos or taking action against his channel would not only raise accusations, it would add another piece to the massive and ever-growing mountain of evidence of anti-conservative bias by these companies.

Also, his videos aren’t smart, or engaging. They are thorough. Thoroughly manipulating statistics, building false premises, and spouting conspiracy theories like how the far-right owns all of media and Republicans broke politics. Give me a break.

I’m not even going to humor the first tweet.

As to the second: He can say it’s not about “‘silencing conservatives'” all day long, it won’t make it any less of a lie. He wants Crowder’s channel shut down for joking about his overt sexuality. In the following tweet, he asks his followers to flag the videos. He’s literally asking people to help shut the channel down. He literally wants to silence a conservative. There’s no other conclusion.

The last few tweets are just repeating the first eleven, so I won’t even bother responding to them, but here they are anyway:

I’m going to end this piece by sending a message directly to Carlos Maza: You’re not being attacking for being gay. You’re being called out and refuted and laughed at because you are the spacer-wearing face of a mainstream media-funded propaganda website that consistently spews out hot garbage like “You’re watching Fox News. You just don’t know it.” and “Comedians have figured out the trick to covering Trump.” You will continue to be called out and refuted and laughed at as long as you keep manipulating, lying, and making up conspiracy theories. As long as you keep vomiting out propaganda, someone will always be fighting for reality. And reality will make its voice heard loud and clear.

The Gravediggers Cometh

Over the past few days, various Democrats running for President have been doing some searching. Not soul-searching, as one would hope. No, searching through the archives of  President Trump’s Twitter feed, as well as the news reels of the past three years, looking for something to brand him with, like a Scarlet Letter, but on the internet. To the internet-savvy folk, it’s called gravedigging, and the Democrats are trying everything they can to desecrate our politics.

It all started a few days ago, when South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg tweeted a not-so-subtle reference to the President’s infamous press conference where he referred to members the gang MS-13 as “animals.” The comments caught fire in the left-wing media, and commentators from CNN to Vox to MSNBC decried his words, simultaneously conflating members of a gang whose slogan is “Kill. Rape. Control.,” and who routinely execute and savagely carve up people, with immigrants trying to enter through the asylum system, and with illegal aliens in toto. 

The Democrats took it a step further, with candidates like Kristen Gillibrand and others tweeting and retweeting an out-of-context clip of the comments.

Then, the next day, California Representative and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam “Full of” Schiff (D-CA) (My nickname) debased himself and his position, as he is want to do, by bringing up the old lie that Donald Trump said there were “fine people on both sides” after the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. Schiff said:

“Look, it’s not the Democratic Party that believes that there are good people on both sides of a Nazi rally,” Schiff said. “There’s just one party and one party leader who believes that, and that’s Donald Trump.”

If the shoe fits.

Even conservative figures, who cynically chided the President in the days following, have to admit that Schiff is just perpetuating an out-and-out lie. Even Wikipedia had to admit that Trump was referring to the peaceful protesters, and that he explicitly called out the Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists. For Schiff to bring up this old canard is exhausting, but entirely predictable. Schiff, and the party more broadly, are out of ammunition, now that the Mueller Report found no collusion between Trump and Russia. Furthermore, the effort to fearmonger to minorities by Democrats in the Presidential primary forces them to bring up these old lies to paint Trump as some sort of racist, so their pandering might actually land a blow.

There are 19 more months until the 2020 elections, and there can be no doubt that the Democrats will be digging up all they can to contest President Trump. They’d better hope something doesn’t reach out and drag them down.

Here We Go Again…

On August 6th, Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube simultaneously banned InfoWars and host Alex Jones from their platform, continuing their ever-increasing pattern of censoring right-wing personalities.

I want to preface this by saying that I think Alex Jones is a nutty nut-ball. I don’t listen to InfoWars, and I think most of the things he says are ridiculous. HOWEVER, he has every right to say what he wants. More importantly, it points to a dangerous precedent that social media companies are all too happy to build on. They unleash their nebulous rules on outlandish and provocative figures like Jones, which allows them to reach for more reasonable folk, until the only voices we hear are the ones the Masters of the Universe want to hear.

“But John, social media companies are private businesses and can refuse service to whoever they want! They’re not abridging anyone’s 1A rights!” I hear you cry. Two things:

1. True, they are private businesses. Now do Masterpiece Cakeshop.
2. It’s not a 1A issue. It’s a free speech issue.

What this boils down to is a major problem: Yes, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. have a right to refuse service as a business. Yet their service is a public forum. Political leaders, athletes, celebrities, and normies like you or I all use the platforms to communicate with others, and that invites some unsavory people, in the same way town squares did in days of old.

Social media companies today presented a choice we must make before it’s too late: either we allow social media companies to censor right-wingers and become leftist message boards, or we hold them to account, and demand they truly commit to their promises of objectivity and freedom online.

The Left is Gunning For Something They Don’t Want

Literally.      

I’ve been watching and reading about leftist mobs harassing and intimidating various Trump Administration Cabinet members, as well as Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, over the past week. The events have been more and more sickening with each video and news story that comes out. Worse, California Representative Maxine Waters openly called for an escalation of these actions.  Leaving out the obvious hypocrisy of these ingrates attacking women while claiming to support them, their actions point to a sign of an ever-growing problem: the left is abandoning civil discourse in favor of violence against its political opponents. We saw this movement manifest itself several times in the past year- at the Congressional Baseball game, where an insane leftist shot several people and nearly killed Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, and again when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was viciously attacked by his neighbor. Last year, these attacks were widely disavowed by both sides. Now, the left is beginning to lionize people for verbally assaulting people they disagree with. They believe they have the moral high ground, and therefore the duty, to confront and attack public servants because they don’t like what they stand for. I have no doubt this will escalate. I worry what will happen then. I’ve been saying since last year that the left will riot in an area with a strong police presence, or National Guard deployments, or even armed citizens, and it will end badly for them. Now I worry that someone will attempt to physically assault one of these officials, or a Congressman, or a judge, and they will be met with Capitol Police or Secret Service. And they will be arrested, or worse, shot.

I don’t want this. I want people to be able to look their politicians in the eye and tell them exactly how they feel. But this is not the way. And I won’t feel sorry for the first person who gets hurt actin’ a fool. I pray the left comes to its senses before it gets to that point.

The Ingraham-Jarrar Standard

Yesterday, Breitbart News author John Nolte penned an article introducing the “Sean Hannity standard” for ethics in journalism. Nolte’s new standard suggests that if Fox News commentator Sean Hannity should be held accountable for his connections to Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, then mainstream media journalists should be held to account for their connections to politicians and public officials.

Also yesterday, Fresno State University professor Randa Jarrar posted several tweets responding to the death of former First Lady Barbara Bush, calling her “a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal,” among other things. Fresno State responded by saying that her statements were made as a private individual, and not in her capacity as a professor. Earlier today, NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch responded with this tweet: 

Great idea, Dana. Ladies and Gentlemen, I hereby propose the Ingraham-Jarrar standard.

The Ingraham refers to Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham, who tweeted this at Parkland student activist David Hogg after video surfaced of him complaining about being rejected to a number of colleges: 

The leftist Twitter mob pounced on Ingraham and Fox News, calling for a boycott of her advertisers in attempt to get her show pulled. Fortunately, Fox stood by her, and the show has since rebounded significantly.

The Ingraham-Jarrar standard is simple: individuals in the public sphere who make statements on their personal Twitter accounts are making those statements as individuals, not as representatives of their news outlet, university, or corporation. Their employers should be held accountable for the views of those they employ. That goes for Laura Ingraham, Randa Jarrar, or anyone else who espouses their views on social media.

The left loves to set standards for themselves. It’s time for conservatives to make sure that those standards apply to everybody.

#MarchForOurLives Is A Political Disaster… For The Left

Leading up to the events of last week, I was beginning to question the Republicans’ chances in the 2018 midterms. After self-styled comedian Michael Ian Black and former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens both suggested a repeal of the Second Amendment and the topic trended on Twitter last week, my fears may not be realized.

According to a Gallup poll conducted last year, some 42% of households in the United States own guns, and some 30% of individuals (around 96 million people) own guns, according to Pew Resesarch. While I could not find any official numbers, I think it is fair to assume that most, if not all, are politically active. In addition, according to a study done by the American National Election Studies, quoted in the Washington Post, some 62 percent of gun owners voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That’s around 59.5 million people who believed, at least in some part, that Donald Trump would defend their Second Amendment rights, a promise he made repeatedly on the campaign trail.

Shortly following the shooting on Valentine’s Day, A number of columns resurfaced on the pages of The New York Times (a former newspaper) from the Sandy Hook massacre, as well as the Las Vegas shooting that suggested a repeal of the Second Amendment. Slowly, articles and tweets began to pop up, floating the idea of repeal because it was written in 1776 or they never imagined AR-15s or George Washington was racist or whatever.

After the White House held a listening session with the survivors and parents, it seemed like negotiations were going smoothly. Both sides of the debate, including the National Rifle Association, were willing to support policies like bans on bump stocks, mental health checks, and tighter restrictions on gun purchasing. That changed in a few hours. During the CNN town hall that night, Parkland survivors called NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch a murderer. Emma Gonzalez arrogantly told Mrs. Loesch that she and her classmates could take better care of her children than Mrs. Loesch could. Cameron Kasky told Senator Marco Rubio to his face that he saw the shooter’s face when he looked at him. As if that didn’t establish these kids as nothing more than contemptuous punks, the media continued to parade their scowling faces on their networks and social media, allowing them to spew their vile hatred for gun owners all the way the nation’s capital on March 24.

The Parkland kids have every intention of making gun control an election issue. They made that clear when they promised to vote out politicians supported by the NRA. They made it even more apparent when David Hogg said that he was going to start a “revolution.” After yesterday’s events, that may not work out in their favor. Google searches for NRA membership spiked during the march’s peak hours. But that was only the beginning. The actions of Justice Stevens, Michael Ian Black, Kurt Eichenwald, Bret Stephens, the marchers, and Twitter made it abundantly clear: the rights of some 96 million gun owners and millions of gun supporters are being threatened. 59 million people rose up to fight for their rights in 2016. If the past week was any indication of where the left is going, that same crowd will undoubtedly rise up again to defend their right to bear arms.

To paraphrase Admiral Yamamoto: I fear all this campaign has done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.